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Amidstweed, dust and lead: a narcotour through Sinaloa in the work of Lenin Márquez1

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13569320802228054

1469-9575

Gabriela Polit Dueñas,

Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 My work in Sinaloa was made possible thanks to a research grant from the Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences initiative (FAHSS) at Stony Brook. 2 The distinction between conceptual knowledge and that of perception is described by Levinas Levinas, I. 2006. Collected philosophical papers, Pittsburgh: Duchesne University Press. [Google Scholar] in his essay on art (2006). 3 Inhabitant of Culiacán. 4 Luis Astorga's Astorga, Luis. 2004. La mitología del narcotraficante en México, México: Plaza y Janés. [Google Scholar] work Mitología del narcotraficante en México (2004) explores the construction of the myth and asserts that this is the fruit of an ignorance of the real historical tensions and contradictions from the origin of the illegal drug trade in the area. 5 Perhaps the oldest and most famous have been put together by Elmer Mendoza his book Cada respiro que tomas (Difocur, 1991). 6 Here I follow the ideas of David Abram Abram, David. 1996. The spell of the sensous, New York: Pantheon Books. [Google Scholar] who asserts that every phenomenological experience occurs on the basis of the experience of nature. This is very clear in Lenin's work in which the dead bodies are part of the rural and urban landscape. Levinas has reflected a great deal on phenomenology and the plastic arts: see Note 2. 7 In the title to the series ‘Aparecidos’ we can see that the violence that prevailed in Latin America in previous decades and that ‘disappeared’ its victims has changed. Violence now saturates the landscape with dead bodies. The generation of the ‘disappeared’ has been replaced by that of the ‘appeared’. 8 The explanation of the use of blankets to cover dead bodies is offered by Lilian Paola Ovalle in a work that analyses the significance of the forms of death in the drugs trade (2006). 9 It should be explained that since January 2007 there has been an intensification of violence and a number of big shots have been taken out. According to the figures of CENAPI, from January to December 2007, some 271 police officers were killed; 945 deaths connected to the drugs trade have been acknowledged nationwide. In August alone, there were 306 deaths (10 every day), 56% of these taking place in Sinaloa, Michoacán, Guerrero and Mexico City. (http:/www.eluniversal.commx/nacion/15881.html) These figures, published in El Universal, seem small by comparison with those reported by the Sinaloa weekly Riodoce in the three months of the army's incursion into the state, when it was asserted that there had already been more than 600 killings. The periodicals agree on is that nobody can be sure whether the killings are due to the army or to narco paramilitaries. What is clear is that this escalation in violence has not solved the question of drug trafficking. Astorga (2007 Astorga, Luis. 2007. “Seguridad, traficantes y militares. El poder y la sombra”. Tusquets, Mexico [Google Scholar]) gives an analysis of how the military response which has grown in strength under recent presidents has failed to deliver viable solutions to the problems of the illegal drugs trade. By the side of these figures, it should be stressed that during my stay in Sinaloa I did not set out to report the reality of the events. The object of my visit was to get a better understanding of the ways in which local people interpreted that reality and represented it. 10 This event is a good example through which to understand Badiou Badiou, E. 2001. Ethics: An essay on the understanding of evil, Londons: Verso. [Google Scholar]'s criticism of ethics. See especially, Ethics: An essay on the understanding of evil (2001). 11 It is crucial to make a distinction between the scientific discourses and even those fictional discourses from which the idiosyncrasies of the local inhabitants are explored. Social science discourse and literature have described the modifications of the values of certain practices and traditions. The value some of the contemporary literature from Sinaloa is to be found in this exploration. The works of Inés Arredondo Arredondo, Inés. 2004. Obras completas, México: Fondo de Cultura. [Google Scholar], the books of A. Nacaveva Nacaveva, A. 2000. El diario de un narcotraficante, 5th ed, México: Costa-Amic Editores S.A. [Google Scholar], and the novels of César López Cuadras and Élmer Mendoza are important in this regard. On the other hand, in the social sciences there are the works of Luis Astorga, Nery Córdova, Rolando González and Elena Simonett, who, albeit from different perspectives and using different methodologies, present thorough descriptions of the local inhabitants, society culture and history. The following pages are indebted to the works f these researchers. There are also the works of local authors (like Héctor R. Olea, 1988 Olea, Hector. R. 1988. “Badiraguato. Vision panoramica de su historia”. Culiacán: DIFOCUR. [Google Scholar]) from the municipality of Badiraguato – the birthplace of various capos in the drug trade – who in their desire to redeem their region of a bad reputation describe local people as essentially courageous; their works have served, paradoxically, to strengthen the mythology surrounding the narco. 12 See especially Masculine domination. 13 Cástulo Bojórquez (César López López Cuadras, César. 1993. La novela inconclusa de Bernardino Casablanca, 2nd ed México [Google Scholar] Cuadras) is a story that explores the primitive features of the mining boom and the life of the people of the mountains. 14 In the book La rebelión de la Sierra: Vida de Heraclio Bernal, there are a number of moments in which the author makes this type of allusion: ‘In order to fulfil his destiny, Heraclio Bernal came on stage when the backdrop of the drama of the Intervention had already come down, and a long time before the rehearsal for the 1910 Revolution’ (Marín Tamayo, 1950 Marín Tamayo, Fausto. 1950. La Rebelión de la Sierra. Vida de Heraclio Bernal, México: Juan Pablos. [Google Scholar]: 97). 15 There are various references to Bernal in many current studies on the culture of Sinaloa, as well as reflections on the value of disobeying the law in the local culture. It is interesting to contrast this image of the northern man and the reflections of Samuel Ramos in El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México and those of Octavio Paz in The Labyrinth of Solitude, indispensable works for an understanding of the importance of masculinity in the construction of the modern Mexican national imaginary. For contemporary versions of Bernal, see Astorga (2004 Astorga, Luis. 2004. La mitología del narcotraficante en México, México: Plaza y Janés. [Google Scholar]), Córdova (2006 Córdova, Nery. 2006. La narcocultura' simbología de la transgresión, el poder y la muerte. Sinaloa y la ‘leyenda negra’. Mazatlán. Manuscript. [Google Scholar]) and Simonett (2004 Simonett, Helena. 2004. En Sinaloa nací. Historia de la música de banda, Mazatlán: Asociación de Gestores del Patrimonio Histórico y Cultural de Mazatlán. [Google Scholar]). 16 People gave him the name Malverde, because ‘he came out of the green and vanished into the green’ (Crónicas: n/p). 17 Malverde's chapel is one of the places where the ‘narcotour’ begins. Pérez Reverte's novel The queen of the south uses it in an important way. The Spanish writer turns the culichi world into a characteristic setting for the drugs trade in Mexico. 18 Figures from Simonett's 2004 book. 19 See especially 1994, 2003, 2004. For discussions of violence in the state of Sinaloa, see González (2007 González, Rolando. 2007. Sinaloa, una sociedad demadiada, Culiacán: DIFOCUR. [Google Scholar]); Córdova (2006 Córdova, Nery. 2006. La narcocultura' simbología de la transgresión, el poder y la muerte. Sinaloa y la ‘leyenda negra’. Mazatlán. Manuscript. [Google Scholar]), amongst others. 20 Operation Condor began in Mexico in November 1975, although it was only implemented in Sinaloa in 1977. According to Astorga, this was the biggest anti-drugs campaign ever carried out in the region. The person in charge of carrying it out in Sinaloa was Jesús Hernández Toledo, who had been responsible for the student massacre in Tlatelolco years before. I have found no precise references (names, documents) to suggest that Operation Condor in Mexico was the same as that in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia) although there is a similarity in the rhetoric of the need to destroy ‘guerrilla bases’ located in the Sierra Madre. The coincidence of name and politics does not appear to be a matter of chance. 21 González (2006) is interesting in this sense: the book maintains that Sinaloa is a state in which civilization is an unfinished process. González analyses the worker, peasant, agricultural and student movements in the 1950s, '60s and '70s and focuses on the profound sense of frustration of all these organizations at seeing their political struggles defeated by central government repression in the 1970s. It is this frustration, the author maintains, and not the barbarity attributed to the culture of the local inhabitants that makes Sinaloa into a state where the illegal trade might take root. In El amante de Janis Joplin, Mendoza explores this period of local history with great brilliance. 22 For a review of the participation of different countries in the illegal drugs trade before and during the Cold War years, as well as the rhetoric around the drugs trade, see Gootemberg (2007 Gootemberg, Paul. 2001. Cocaine. Global Histories, UK: Routlege. [Google Scholar]). 23 This is one of the first narcocorridos popularised by Los Tigres del Norte. 24 The hybridizing of the religious and the criminal so common in certain criminal cultures is exacerbated, as the title suggest, in Vallejo's novel La virgen de los sicarios (see Polit Dueñas, 2006). 25 Studies on narcocorridos have proliferated in recent years. Among the first were those by Maria Herrera Sobek (1990) and Luis Astorga (1985). More recently there are works by Elijah Wald (2002), Sam Quiñónez (2001 Quiñónez, Sam. 2001. True Tales from Another Mexico, Albuquerque: Albuquerque UP. [Google Scholar]) and José Manuel Valenzuela (2002 Valenzuela, José Manuel. 2002. Jefe de jefes. Corridos y Narcocultura en México, Barcelona: Plaza & Janes. [Google Scholar]). The state prohibition on the playing of narcocorrdios on local radio has been analysed in the works of Klaus Wellinga (2002 Klass, Wellinga. 2002. “Cantando a los traficatnes” in Foro Hispánico. Revista Hispánica de Paises Bajos, 22: 137–154. [Google Scholar]) and Juan Carlos Ramírez-Pimienta (2004 Ramírez-Pimienta, Juan José. 2004. Del corrido de narcotraficante al narcocorrido: Orígenes y desarrollo del canto a los traficantes. Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, 23: 21–41. [Google Scholar]). Narcocorridos cannot be seen as an homogenous group of songs, but in all of them masculinity is extolled as a moral value connected to honour and, of course, challenging death is a sign of manliness. The polemic around narcocorridos also involves their performers. Los Tigres del Norte the Sinaloan group with the biggest audience on both sides of the border, is also an object of analysis in some of the works mentioned. An alternative approach to narcocorridos from the inside is given by James Nicolopoulos, in his two CDs put out by Arboolie Productions. Nicolopoulos's work demonstrates that the songs about drugs and cross-border shipments are very old and that contemporary discussions have to recognize that the ‘boom’ in narcocorridos owes much to a cultural industry that promotes them as something new. This is the framework of the violence generated by the illegal drugs traffic: narcocorridos become more controversial and better selling at the same time. Listen to especially ‘the Roots of the Narcocorrido’ (2004) and ‘Columpio del diablo’ (2000). 26 Although it is perhaps Valenzuela who most dissents from Simonett, since he states that ‘[The] corrido is inscribed in a syncretic process where together with other forms of popular music that have deep roots, like cumbia or tambora music, it expands its field of reception through processes that cannot be reduced to the “manipulative capacities of the media”, but to its levels of appropriation by wider popular sectors’ (2002: 93). He also makes a distinction between the popular corrido and the popularesque version, the latter being more commercial. 27 Its author Adrián López López, Adrián. 2007. Ensayo de una provocación, Culiacán: Difocur. [Google Scholar] was 26 when he won the prize. The book is a rather ambitious approach to local history and to the extent of narco culture. (Thanks to Juan Esmerio Navarro for sharing his manuscript with me prior to its publication.) 28 Los Tigres del Norte have a more ambiguous posture in the face of criticism of narcocorridos. They defend their songs because, in the end, they say, they reflect local reality (Ramírz-Pimineta, 2004). 16 Super Éxitos (Univisión, 1989), Los 30 Corridos más prohibidos, various authors, Univisión, 2003. The resent assassination of several performers of narcocorridos has been the object of much speculation. The analysis of these events exceeds the objective of this article but it is worth mentioning that these deaths are elements that contribute to the myth surrounding the drugs trade. 29 Again, this is not to endorse or disqualify the conceptions of narcocorridos but to attest to the complex perceptions that the people of Sinaloa have of them. 30 The word compassion (pity) suggests the presence of a Superior being as mediator between the self and the other, whom I do not know but see as victim. Pity in this sense evokes charity. Here I do not use the word pity in his mystical/religious meaning. I understand pity as a positive feeling in the context of a superior reality which is political life, life in society. Pity, in this context, would be the search for justice. Faced with collective disenchantment with the executive organizations of justice, Lenin's work is a legitimate space of condemnation, but above all it is the creation of a mourning that produces discomfort but finds no political resolution.